The present invention relates to smoking articles such as cigarettes, and in particular, to the manner in which cigarettes are packaged.
Popular smoking articles, such as cigarettes, have a substantially cylindrical rod shaped structure and include a charge of smokable material such as shredded tobacco (e.g., cut filler) surrounded by a paper wrapper thereby forming a so-called "tobacco rod". It has become desirable to manufacture cigarettes having cylindrical filter elements aligned in an end-to-end relationship with the tobacco rod. Typically, filter elements are manufactured from fibrous materials (e.g., cellulose acetate tow) circumscribed by plug wrap, and are attached to the tobacco rods using circumscribing tipping materials. Such cigarettes having filter elements are referred to as "filter cigarettes".
Filter cigarettes conventionally have been sold in packages, and each package normally contains 20 or 25 cigarettes. Typical cigarette packages have a generally rectangular parallelepiped form. One type of popular cigarette package employs a container having the form of a so-called "soft package" or "soft pack". See, for example, U.S. Pat. Nos. 2,383,728 to Little; 3,695,422 to Tripodi and 4,717,017 to Sprinkel, Jr., et al.; and U.S. patent application Ser. No. 760,046, filed Sep. 13, 1991. Cigarettes are removed from a soft package by tearing away a portion of the top of the package, in order that cigarettes can be easily accessed from the top of the package.
Such cigarette containers typically are overwrapped using a clear polymeric film (e.g., polyethylene or polypropylene overwrap films) or a metallized thermoplastic film, to maintain freshness of the cigarettes within the container, and thereby form a final cigarette package. A strip of polymeric material known as a "tear tape" is provided for easy opening of the polymeric overwrap films. The tear tape is positioned adjacent to the top of the package. The tear tape (which normally has some color and projects slightly from the package as a tab) is pulled by the smoker to easily open the polymeric overwrap. In particular, the protruding end of the tear tape is pulled to slit the polymeric overwrap, the polymeric overwrap covering the top of the container is removed, and the top of the container is opened to expose the filter ends of the cigarettes contained therein. The smoker then grasps the filter end of a cigarette with his/her fingers to remove the cigarette from the package.
Soft packages, once opened, are not easily re-closed. That is, unlike the type of cigarette package described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,390,340 to Burrows et al., a top portion of the soft package often is torn away in a manner such that the soft package cannot be re-closed very effectively or with any great degree of ease. As a result, once the package is opened, cigarettes can have a tendency to fall out of the package, and foreign materials can have an undesirable tendency to be introduced into the package. In addition, certain popular soft package designs can employ significant amounts of packaging materials.
It would be desirable to provide packaged cigarettes such that the package can be readily opened, cigarettes can be readily removed from the package, and the package can be easily re-closed.